Classes

Course Description

In the U.S. Presidential election of 2000, a Supreme Court ruling ultimately cleared the way for Florida's Secretary of State to certify electors pledged to the Republican party. Yet thousands of mis-marked butterfly ballots alone imply that a plurality of Florida's population did not prefer Bush. In this class we ask, what is a 'fair' electoral system in terms of representing the preferences of the public? In what ways can actual vote tallies and election outcomes deviate as measurements of these preferences? To address the latter question, we consider the emerging social science of election forensics and its application to recent disputed elections in Russia, Iran, Mexico, and Turkey, among other high-profile cases.